A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

Hidden Palace as well, they do deep-dives into what they get, then release it. Amazing folks. All the same, there are many who hold things to their chest for months, even years, until they get a chance to use that data for their own self-promotion.

Ultimately, if your so-called preservation team is one bad day, one failed hard drive, one missed domain re-registration, or one cloud backup away from not having anything at all preserved, re-think what you claim to be dedicated to, because it isn't what you think.

Just as a final post-script, a point that I omitted: If you're just building up archives of boards, of discs, of floppies, you're not preserving anything. Bit-rot is a thing. Disc rot is a thing. Magnetic coercivity going down over time is a thing.

Unless you can be absolutely sure that your archive is documented, with wide hashes, and backed up across countless machines such that nothing short of an apocalyptic event would make it unavailable, it hasn't been preserved. Release, or become equally lost.

Well my archiving is a bit of a failure as there isn't any mame equivalent to contribute the data to. I would need to build some mame equivalent for emulating old home keyboard sound chips to begin with and I don't have expertise to do that. I hope I can find a solution one day

That's not true, though. MAME has skeleton drivers for a boatload of music keyboards, even if the main CPU happens to be a microcontroller (known or not) with an internal ROM. As long as there's something dumpable, it can be included, and documented as well as possible.

Well that is the other issue, tricking the proprietary cpus into dumping the mask rom (likely from a test mode). Some of the external roms have been floating around for years on a synth rom dumping site but I feel without the mask roms the functionality won't be there.